Friday, June 2, 2017

Compassion, not perfection

On Wednesday of this week I sent out my monthly Way2Grow Coaching ezine. Generally, I have the ezine written several days, if not at least a week, ahead of when it will be distributed. My schedule this time was such that I didn't get it written until the night before it was to be distributed at 5 a.m. I proof-read it a couple times, and everything looked good. Or so I thought.

The next morning when I looked at the ezine in my inbox, right away I found an error. Since I'm a perfectionist, albeit a recovering one, the error jumped right out at me as though it were rimmed in flashing red lights. It was too late to do anything about it since the ezine was already in the inboxes of all subscribers.

In days gone by, I would have obsessed over the error and beat myself up for it. This time, I'm happy to say, I told myself that it did me good to make an editing error once in a while ... and then to let it go. It's good practice for a recovering perfectionist! That doesn't mean it's easy. But I want to learn to unhook my self-worth from the things I do or don't do. I want to be more gentle and compassionate with myself when I make mistakes. I want to acknowledge that I'm human! I definitely am a work-in-progress.

Do you have things that hook you up like this? Can you use self-compassion to handle it?